Lawsuits in Four Caribbean Countries Challenge Colonial-era Sodomy Laws

 | 
08/08/2019

LGBTI people in four Caribbean countries over the last year have filed lawsuits against their nations’ colonial-era sodomy laws. Javin Johnson and Sean Macleish on July 26 filed a lawsuit against two laws in St. Vincent and the Grenadines that criminalize consensual same-sex sexual relations. Daryl Phillip, founder of Minority Rights Dominica, and Maurice Tomlinson, a senior policy analyst at the Toronto-based HIV Legal Network, on July 18 announced a gay man who remains anonymous filed a lawsuit against Dominica’s sodomy law. Tomlinson, who was born in Jamaica, on Aug. 18, 2018, challenged his homeland’s sodomy law with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Alexa Hoffmann, a transgender activist in Barbados, along with a gay man and a lesbian woman on June 6, 2018, filed a lawsuit against their country’s sodomy law with the same commission.

Share this:

Latest Global News

Added on: 07/26/2024
07/25/2024
Ghana’s Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a six-decade-old law criminalizing gay sex as the west African country awaits another court decision on whether to …
Added on: 07/26/2024
07/25/2024
The Government of Namibia has chosen the wrong side of history by challenging the recent High Court ruling that declared the country’s apartheid-era ban …
Added on: 07/26/2024
07/25/2024
It’s hard to believe it was little over a year ago. Just 12 months ago, the best women’s soccer teams from across the globe …

Explore LGBTQ+ Issues

Added on: 07/24/2024
In June, the LGBT+ association Kap Caraïbe in the French Caribbean island of Martinique had to cancel many of the events it planned as …
Added on: 07/20/2024
The global push to recognize the rights of LGBTQ couples continued in separate parts of the world this month when the Dutch Supreme Court …
Added on: 07/06/2024
Hand in hand, Andrea and Fiorella attend an improvised mass in the garage of a house in San Salvador. There they say they don’t …